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Little Things that Help Others

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 A plainly dressed woman was noticed picking up something on a
poor slum street where ragged, barefoot children were accustomed to playing.
The policeman on the beat noticed the woman’s actions, and watched her very
suspiciously. Several times her saw her stoop, pick up something, and hide it
in her apron. Finally, he went up to her, and with a gruff voice demanded,
“What are you carrying off in your apron?” The timid woman did not answer at
first, whereupon the policeman, thinking she must have found something
valuable, threatened her with arrest if she did not show him what she had in
her apron. The woman opened her apron and revealed a handful of broken glass.
“What do you want with that stuff?”, asked the policeman. The woman replied, “I
just thought I would pick it up so the glass would not hurt the children’s
feet.”


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Little
things help others. How long has it been since you took the time to go someone
who lives alone? How long has it been since you wrote a letter to someone who
crossed your mind? How long has it been since you read the Bible to someone too
ill to read for themselves?

 

Every
one of us can do something to encourage someone else! If we don’t use our
“little talents” to do little things to help people, then we may lose them. A
few years ago I read in “Reader’s Digest” a short article about a group of sea
gulls that was starving in St. Augustine. They were not starving because of a
food shortage but because they have forgotten how to fish. For years they had
depended on the shrimp fleet operating out of the harbor to toss them scraps
from the nets. When the shrimp fleet moved to Key West, they began to starve.
They had lost their natural ability to fish because they had not been using it.

 

This
is a rule of nature. If you do not use what you have, it will be taken from
you. This is the lesson in the parable of the talents. The servant who did not
use his one talent had it taken from him.

 

Your
community needs the little things you can do for the people in it. You will
never pass this way again, so do the little things for people while you can.